Chow Chow
25 Tiny Young Cucumbers 15 Onions, Sliced 2 Quarts String Beans, Cut in Half 4 Quarts Green Tomatoes 2 Heads White Cabbage 4 Red Peppers 4 Tablespoons Mustard Seed 1 Cup Sugar 2 Tablespoons each of Celery Seed, Whole Allspice and Whole Cloves Cider Vinegar Salt Prepare the vegetables, place in stone jar in layers with a slight sprinkling of salt between layers. Let stand twelve > hours and drain off the brine. Put the vegetables in a kettle over the fire, sprinkling through them the spices and sugar. Pour on enough of best cider vinegar to cover; cover tightly and simmer well until thoroughly cooked. Put Mash well together and boil twenty in glass jars when hot. Tomatoes and minutes. cabbage must be chopped coarsely. 1 Tablespoon each of Salt, Pepper, Cinnamon and Cloves
This is a mixed-vegetable vinegar pickle of a very common early twentieth-century type, but the text as printed cannot be followed safely or, in places, coherently. A current tested recipe from a food-preservation authority should be used instead.
- Open-kettle canning"Put in glass jars when hot" is the old open-kettle method: hot food into hot jars, lid on, seal by cooling. It has been abandoned because the jar contents are not heated after sealing and the seal itself is unreliable, leaving a sealed, unprocessed container of cooked vegetables. Modern practice processes filled jars in a boiling-water canner for a specified time.
- The vinegar is not measured"Enough of best cider vinegar to cover" is the whole acid specification. Acidity is the only thing standing between this jar and Clostridium botulinum, and it depends on the ratio of vinegar to vegetable and on the vinegar's strength. Nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century cider vinegar was of variable and often unknown acidity; modern bottled vinegar is standardised at 5 percent, but the recipe gives no ratio to apply it to.
- The vegetables are all low-acidThe vegetables are all low-acid or borderline -- cucumbers, onions, cabbage, beans and peppers are low-acid; green tomatoes are more acidic than the rest but tomatoes are still treated as borderline and needing added acid for safe canning. Nothing here is safe on its own account; the pickle is safe only if the finished brine is acid enough throughout, and there is no way to know from these instructions whether it would be.
- The salting step is not a cureA twelve-hour layered salting with "a slight sprinkling" draws water out of the vegetables and firms them. It is a texture and dilution step, not a preservation step, and the brine is then thrown away. It contributes nothing to the safety of the sealed jar.
- The text is garbledThe instructions as printed have collapsed two recipes or two columns into one another: "Put Mash well together and boil twenty in glass jars when hot" and the stray closing line of salt, pepper, cinnamon and cloves belong elsewhere. There is no reliable way to reconstruct the intended method, which is a second reason not to work from this page.
- The stone jarThe "stone jar" of the salting stage is a glazed stoneware crock, used because it is non-reactive against salt and vinegar. A food-grade plastic bucket or a glass or stainless bowl fills the same role; bare aluminium, copper and cast iron do not.
- ScaleFour quarts of green tomatoes, two quarts of beans, two cabbages and twenty-five cucumbers is a harvest-day batch, not a kitchen one. It reflects a household putting up a season's relish at once, and would fill something on the order of a dozen or more pint jars.
Chow chow is the American name for a mixed pickle of chopped garden vegetables in spiced vinegar, and it turns up under that name across the Pennsylvania Dutch counties, the South and New England, with the proportions shifting according to what the garden gave up. The name is generally traced to the pidgin term for the mixed sweet preserves shipped out of Chinese ports in the nineteenth century, carried home by traders and then attached to the domestic relish it superficially resembled; the derivation is traditional rather than firmly documented. Its practical purpose is plain from the ingredient list, which is a description of a vegetable garden at first frost: green tomatoes that will never ripen, the last of the beans, cabbage, small cucumbers, peppers. That a cookbook of this period includes it among the pickles says something about what a new household was expected to do in September, and about how much of the winter table was vinegar and spice.